I’m writing because I believe my story may enlighten you to a problem that we Californians face. I do realize that this is largely a Federal issue.

What I’m talking about is health care, particularly health insurance. I think I have an interesting perspective due to circumstances that have taken place in my life over the past couple of years. This is about two of my friends more than myself, but it gives me a more complete perspective.

I have a friend who years ago had back surgery and a couple of years ago, mental illness added to her situation. She worked as long as she could and lived off her savings until nothing was left. After much difficulty she is now partly covered by MediCal. However, her mental illness is mostly being ignored by the system. I do believe that the system has had too many people taking unfair advantage of it and I largely agree with the filtering system even though it has caused a hardship in my life.

I’m forced to carry my own medical insurance since my employee’s insurance has yearly caps of $5,000 and a lifetime cap of $50,000. That is not really what I call insurance. So, I pay $3,000 a year, 10% of my income, for a high deductible insurance that seems to go up several times a year. But I make due.

Now here is the toughest part of my story. My other friend works for the same employer and is offered the same useless insurance. She, however, has had cancer in the past and has used up the lifetime max from our employer’s insurance. She now cannot find insurance for less than $2,000 a month. That is over 80% of her income. So she can be homeless and hungry with insurance, or not have insurance. She could lose her job and try to get MediCal, but that is not the kind of person she is. The cancer has returned and she needs medical care, but none is to be found. Here is a person who wants to be, and has been an upstanding citizen, but finds that a person doing as they should, can still not get the help they need when they need it most.

The state of California required auto insurance, but people are left to die by our health care system. Can’t there be a system like the auto insurance system that forces insurance to offer a fair rate to high-risk people? Bad driving is an individual’s fault; cancer and other diseases are not. But we as a society force people to be useless to society before we help. I do not see how this attitude encourages self-reliance.

Curt Sautter
Ontario, CA